Orange Pi Targets Edge AI with the DeepSeek "Deeply Adapted" Orange Pi RV2
New RISC-V single-board computer comes with the promise of two TOPS of AI compute performance, despite lacking a dedicated neural core.
Embedded computing specialist Orange Pi has launched a successor to its Orange Pi RV single-board computer, this time concentrating on delivering energy-efficient compute for artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI and ML) at the edge: the Orange PI RV2.
"Orange Pi RV2 is a cost-effective RISC-V development board with Ky X1 eight-core RISC-V AI CPU," the company claims of its latest launch, "providing 2 TOPS [Tera-Operations Per Second] CPU fusion of general-purpose computing power to support rapid deployment of AI model algorithms. It has 2GB/4GB/8GB LPDDR4X [RAM], supports eMMC module (16GB/32GB/64GB/128GB optional), has Wi-Fi 5.0 + [Bluetooth] 5.0, with BLE [Bluetooth Low Energy] support."
The gadget, brought to our attention by Linux Gizmos, is based around the Ky X1 system-on-chip; its eight RISC-V cores are, the company claims, around a third again as fast as an Arm Cortex-A55 core running at the same clock speed, and deliver a total of over 40,000 Dhrystone millions of instructions per second (DMIPS) of compute — and a "CPU-fused" neural processing subsystem with a claimed two tera-operations per second (TOPS) of compute at INT8 precision for AI and ML workloads, despite the lack of a dedicated neural processing unit (NPU).
The boards are available with 2GB, 4GB, or 8GB of LPDDR4X memory and an optional eMMC module of between 16GB and 128GB, expandable via microSD Card or a pair of PCI Express Gen. 2 M.2 M-key sockets with Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) support. There's on-board Wi-Fi 5, Bluetooth 5.0, and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) connectivity, plus two gigabit Ethernet ports, support for 1920×1440 displays at up to 60 frames per second over HDMI 2.0 or four-lane MIPI Display Serial Interface (DSI), two four-lane MIPI Camera Serial Interface (CSI) inputs, three USB 3.0 ports and a USB 2.0 On-The-Go (OTG) port, a four-pin header for an additional USB 2.0 port, analog audio in and out, and a 26-pin general-purpose input/output (GPIO) header with UART, I2C, and SPI buses, plus pulse-width modulation (PWM) support.
Orange Pi is positioning the device as ideal for anyone looking for an energy-efficient system for experimenting with artificial intelligence at the edge — even going so far as to claim the design has been "deeply adapted to DeepSeek," the recently-released freely-downloadable large language model. This, however, refers to the "distilled" models, where the larger DeepSeek has been used to hone smaller existing models — the full DeepSeek requiring almost two terabytes of memory to run, and thus being somewhat outsized for the Orange Pi RV2.
The company has listed the board for sale on AliExpress at $30 for the 2GB variant, $39.90 for the 4GB version, and $49.90 for the 8GB model. More information is available on the Orange Pi website.
